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Thursday, January 8, 2009

While flipping through my most recent issue of Architectural Digest (which persists in coming to my house in Minnesota...for some reason I get about half of my mail at my apartment in Iowa and half of it in Minnesota...) I noticed that most of the projects featured were rather...bland. Now don't get me wrong, there wasn't really anything wrong with any of the projects individually. I actually truly liked the majority of them, and they featured interesting furniture selections or other nice components. Taken as a whole, however, the magazine was pretty blah. I flipped through it once, but when I was thinking about it later realized that I could not really recall anything specific from any individual project. Upon looking through it again, I realized that if I had not known any better, I would have throught all of the images were from the same project. Every design (except one, which featured different shades of blue interspersed throughout the residence...but otherwise was no different) was in the same neutral color palette.

Basically I just found it interesting that in such a luxurious and highly respected publication, they would not feature more diversity. I mean, do you know what kind of work it takes to get featured in their pages? I don't mean to make them sound completely awful, though. This is the first time I can remember (in about a year and a half of receiving the magazine monthly) feeling so disappointed in an issue. I'll have to pay close attention in the future and see how I feel about what is being featured.

Some good did come from this disappointment, though. I remember last year looking at the senior interior design students gallery show that displayed their range of work from being in the interior program. Each student had a fill-in-the-blank profile next to their work, and one of the things each of them had to answer was their "design philosophy". I have been thinking about that off-and-on ever since then, because while I have had a somewhat vague idea in my head about what my personal design philosophy is, I have not been able to nail it down. Now, however, I know exactly what will go in that blank:

"Create every project to have its own personality, like something nobody has ever seen before."